Category Archives: Objective Morality

Rules

06 Tuesday Jun 2017

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Objective Morality, Personal History

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(“More what you might call ‘guidelines’ …”)

If you don’t get the above reference, then I pity the life you’ve led.

Anyway, it turns out that I have “rules.” The idea hadn’t occurred to me so much, one way or the other, until some 20 years ago, when I happened to formulate these “rules.” (I’ll stop scare-quoting the word now.) I may or may not have mentioned the fact that I was (for a while, at least) a moderately serious Renaissance Faire participant, what is often referred to as a “rennie.” And by “participant,” I mean I had invested something in the neighborhood of $1,200.00 in garb and gear (about half of that was for my custom made, thigh-high boots alone) to participate in character as a low ranking German nobleman of the 16th C. The attached picture really is me (and yes, that is my hair). I share it here with the generous permission of the photographer, Jeffrey Gibson, D. Phil. The hyper link at his name is to his photographer’s website, and I encourage everyone to follow that link and take a look at some of his work.Gerhard11 - Gibson photographer

In any event, it was at Ren Faire – in garb and in character – that I learned that I had rules. Rules about interpersonal, social/sexual interactions. This would be a matter of scarcely any interest even to myself, except that the nature of those rules has some interesting philosophical characteristics over and beyond just what I personally will or will not do. It is to this latter I wish, ultimately, to address myself. But first I have to say a bit about the rules themselves, so that the philosophical implications have something to build upon. But to get to the rules themselves, I first must tell a story. Continue reading →

Thieves, Dirty Thieves, and Plagiarists

23 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by in Ethics, Objective Morality

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A colleague of mine asked if I might do a post on plagiarism. For the record, I do requests (try the veal and be sure to tip your waitress; or is it the other way around?) I will resist the temptation to stampede off into rhetorical excesses about “special circles of hell,” but I am offended by plagiarism to the core of my being. Plagiarism is the cardinal sin of scholarship only to the extent that cardinal sins are warm and fuzzy things that you laugh about at a party. OK, some rhetorical excess …cockroach5

Plagiarism is nominally the stealing of words and concepts, and then presenting these as your own original work at the time of presentation. This definition is not the one you’ll necessarily find in the dictionary, because those definitions tend to emphasize the stealing of other people’s words, while I mean to insist that there is also such a thing as self plagiarism. (Also, dictionary definitions and Wikipedia entries do not answer questions so much as they provide a useful heuristic for asking better questions.) Most persons who deal with and condemn plagiarism do so as a charge against the plagiarizers for not doing the work they claim to have done. I will go much further than this charge, however, and argue that the plagiarizer has not simply stolen materials, but has positively wounded the person stolen from. Continue reading →

When We do “IT,” It’s ok …

01 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by in Anonymous, Critical Thinking, Ethics, Objective Morality

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So, I just read how the hacker “group” Anonymous has been publicly outing members of the KKK. This has been variously accompanied by triumphalist celebrations by some people on the political Left. “Yay … justice … woo-hoo …”

I find such behavior singularly disgusting, both the outing and the celebration of it. When homosexuals are outed against their will – sometimes with devastating consequences – this is an intolerable violation of those persons’ privacy and lives. But when “we” do something similar, it is “justice”! When workers and protectors at a Planned Parenthood clinic have their faces, their families, their home addresses plastered all over the internet, this is a violent attack on their persons and safety. But when “we” do it, it is “justice”. Because, “obviously,” “we” are “good” guys, and “they” are “bad” people.Mlk-in-birmingham-jail

How is it that the question of right or wrong is exhausted by answering whether or not we are the one’s doing it? The question is obviously rhetorical, and the answer is, “obviously, it is not.”

There are numerous examples of nominally wrong actions being done for right reasons such that those reasons suffice to (arguably, at least) justify those actions. To kill another person is wrong, but if that killing occurred in the course of self-defense or the protection of innocent people, it will generally be viewed as a justifiable homicide. Violating the law is typically viewed as wrong, but when the law itself is unjust and immoral, then violating that law can itself become a moral duty. This is the leverage I wish to apply to the actions of Anonymous toward the KKK. My instrument of choice here is one of the most tightly reasoned moral arguments of the last century: Dr. King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Continue reading →

Oh Ashley …

30 Sunday Aug 2015

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Ethics, Objective Morality

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Schadenfreude – the pleasure one takes at hearing about or seeing other people’s troubles – is not a viable standard for ethical evaluations, even when the people whose troubles we are rejoicing in are the absolute scum of the earth and deserve all the things, and even worse, that are happening to them. Feeling good about other people’s troubles, quite aside from indicating a rather profound flaw in one’s character (a flaw a great many of us suffer from), is logically – and therefore morally – vacuous; it is a form of the argumentum ad misericordiam, and therefore patently fallacious.Rabbit Hole But more than just the logical issues involved, I want to spend some time considering the ethical dimensions attached to schadenfreude, specifically as these relate to the recent Ashley Madison hack. Continue reading →

Tortured Logic

20 Saturday Dec 2014

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Ethics, Martin Luther King, Objective Morality

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So, the Senate’s report on torture has come out. Former Vice President Dick Cheney, as singularly despicable a human being as has ever crawled out from under a rock, assures us that this program was approved at the highest levels. Is a crime a crime if Important People decide not to call it such? For example, the excuse given by one active participant in the CIA’s blatant torture of prisoners (conducted without regard for the prisoners’ guilt or innocence – to say nothing of basic human decency – and the repeatedly demonstrated FACT that such methods never produce reliable information; more on this momentarily) was that three out of four past Attorneys General of the United States had approved of the practices. Iron Maiden

As Jon Stewart points out in the previous link, the three were all Attorneys General appointed by the Bush administration, which administered the programs of torture as a matter of policy orchestrated at the highest level. Stewart’s approach – via satire and such humor as one may bring to bear in the face of our public complicity in crimes against humanity – to the contrary not withstanding, his argument nevertheless bears appreciation. Continue reading →

Objective Values

15 Monday Sep 2014

Posted by in Critical Thinking, General Philosophy, Objective Morality

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Are there such things as “objective values”? That is, are there values that have a claim to objective reality in much the same way as the laws of physics? Or are all value claims subjective, nothing more than a matter of personal taste and desire, without any special reference to what is real beyond the fact of the desire?

Caution needs to be exercised here, as the framing of the questions above pose a false dichotomy. In addition, asking about objective values is a different question from that regarding the existence of objective morality. Values can be morally neutral, whereas morals are a very definite sub-collection of values. It is possible that some values might be objectively real (chocolate is objectively yummy not because we like it, but because it is just the best thing in the world), without ever entailing (in the logical sense of formal implication at the deepest levels of meaning) that any objectively real morals exist. Conversely, there can be objectively real moral values which nevertheless offer no further implications to the full range of other values, or even to other putative moral values. The relations involved are not simple ones, and do not involve set-theoretic/mereological containments (A is a smaller part of B) nor any necessarily transitive implications (that is, A implies B, and B implies C, therefore A implies C.) Connections – insofar as they exist at all – are “thin,” and can fade with the (metaphorical) “distance” between acts of evaluations, intentions, meanings, and values themselves.

Continue reading →